Brain
The first PC virus carried its authors' names, address and telephone number
Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi ran a computer shop in Lahore. Frustrated at unlicensed copying of software they had written, they produced a boot-sector virus that spread on floppy disks, relabelled the disk volume as ©Brain, and left a message inside the code containing their names, their shop's address and three telephone numbers.
They expected local irritation. Instead the disks travelled, and within months they were fielding calls from the United States and Europe from people asking how to remove it. The virus damaged nothing; it simply spread.
The first PC virus in the wild, and an early lesson that software behaviour does not respect the boundaries its author imagined — an assumption that still underpins a great deal of unintended spread.
The Hacker Chronicles
Volume One — Origins
This page is the summary. The chapter — ‘Brothers from Lahore’ — follows the case properly: what was known at the time, who decided what, and how it actually unfolded rather than how it was later retold.
Two more volumes this year.
Going Geopolitical in October, Going Strategic in December.
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